Royal Slots Review

The
Good

Standard slots game that works as intended. Wide range of themes. Some mini-games.

The
Bad

Getting coins is based too heavily on number of friends playing or paying real cash. Lackluster visual and audio appeal. Coins seem to run out quickly.

Royal Slots is a passable slots game, but it lacks personality

The first time I sat down to play Royal Slots, my stash of coins lasted less than 10 minutes before I had to stop playing. When I gave it a second chance a few hours later, my little pittance of “bonus” currency lasted about 55 seconds. If I wanted to keep playing, I would have had to spend at least $10 in Facebook credits on coins to the horror of the little angel on my right shoulder who nagged that I might have a problem. Sure, I might have earned some more by dragging a friend or two over to CookApps’ social take on the slots genre, but I couldn’t convince a single one of them that playing slots with no tangible return could be fun.

And that’s a problem with the entire concept. No matter how you much you smother the application with minigames or dress it in striking visuals, a slots game on Facebook inevitably amounts to clicking a button over and over and hoping you win. Some are better at this than others (such as the worthwhile 3D Slots by Product Madness), but even then you’re still left with the awkwardness of paying to play a game that has only ever existed in the real world to tease you with the chance of winning your cash back.

On Facebook, you’re simply dumping money into the slot. Unless you’re the kind of player who sees substantial value in lording your digital winnings over those of your friends (or the random strangers on the real-time leaderboard) playing slots on Facebook makes only a little more sense than filling out lottery tickets and hoping they match up with the winning numbers from three years ago.

Here, you don’t even have to press any buttons. Thanks to an “AutoSpin” feature, you can set a bet amount and a maximum number of lines and kick back and let the game do the work for you. If you take this route, the only time you’ll need to return to the game which is when you either run out of money or trigger one of the bonus games by lining up a few uncommon icons. If you do, you’ll find that most don’t even have the personality or visual appeal common to similar titles owing to a lack of background music during the actual gameplay and only minimal visual changes between slots. In the first of the game’s current 22 themes, for instance, you flip over coins on a generic Las Vegas card table for the hope of securing a thimbleful of coins that will last you a few rounds at best.

Royal Slots maintains this fairly tightfisted approach throughout the rest of the game, with the consequence that you could run out of money within minutes even if you’re miserly with your bets. Wins are rare (unless I’m the unluckiest social gamer on Earth, which may well be possible), and the only way to amass a good pile of emergency coins without forking out real cash is to have a swarm of friends playing with you in order to take advantage of the bonus coins you get for having them play.

Still, if slots are really your thing, you could put down $10 and become a VIP member for 20 percent extra experience points and other perks. But if they are, it’s probably not worth sitting through this merely passable slots application when there are better offerings out there.